The first time I made Thanksgiving dinner, I couldn't FIND the darn giblets. I looked in the turkey, got the plastic bag out of the trash -- couldn't find them. Okay, then. Roasted the turkey and made giblet gravy without giblets. It wasn't until I was tearing the turkey apart to refrigerate that I found the giblets -- under the skin of the turkey, beneath one of the wings! Not exactly a disaster, but it was just really strange.

The first time I made Thanksgiving dinner, I couldn't FIND the darn giblets. I looked in the turkey, got the plastic bag out of the trash -- couldn't find them. Okay, then. Roasted the turkey and made giblet gravy without giblets. It wasn't until I was tearing the turkey apart to refrigerate that I found the giblets -- under the skin of the turkey, beneath one of the wings! Not exactly a disaster, but it was just really strange.

It's for just this reason that many turkey processors I've encountered recently (last five years or so) have been putting the giblets in a paper pouch instead of plastic - if it's roasted with the turkey, no harm done to giblets or turkey, unlike a plastic bag that would ruin it all.

My Mom is a reasonably good cook and tried very hard to feed us healthy, nutritious food growing up (not that I appreciated that then ). One of the dishes that we all loved was her chicken soup which she made from scratch. She has alway been thrifty and would freeze the meat stock she collected along with fruit from our garden, including the lemon juice squeezed from our trees.

Note: lemon juice and chicken stock look very similar if one is in a hurry, especially if they are stored in dark tupperware containers.

So one night we all sat down to dinner. It had been a long, frustrating day for my parents and the entire family was looking forward to the comfort of Mom's chicken soup. She spooned up bowls for my sister and me and told us to start eating while she took care of my father's and her portions. My sister and I took one bite and knew something was Very Very Wrong. My Dad saw our expressions and immediately took us to task - didn't we know how hard my mother worked? Shame on us for being so picky! Then my mother sat down, he got his bowl, and he took his first bite. My Dad's mouth puckered involuntarily. The expression originated from his lips and rippled along his face, finally settling somewhere behind his ears. My Mom's face matched his.

There is nothing that can be done to rescue chicken soup that had lemon juice substituted for chicken stock. Everything tasted of lemon and nothing else, the chicken, the noodles, and the vegetables. My sister and I ended up adding sugar and whipped cream and the story of Lemon Meringue Soup became family legend.

Back in the stone ages when I went to college, we weren't supposed to have stoves/hotplates or anything else that might involve cooking in our rooms. The RAs usually gave you quite a bit of leeway on this as long as it didn't look dangerous. I had a pizza oven that I stored under the bed, and a "mini" fridge that actually had a pull out two burner stove.

My mother loved canning things, and I frequently brought stuff up to my dorm room to have for meals on the weekend. One day, I put some canned Chili into a pot on the stove and then went off to start my laundry while it cooked. I didn't know when it started cooking that the chili didn't actually get canned well and had gone bad. On top of that, I spent a bit more time than expected in the laundry room so the Chili burned on the bottom.

I came back down the hall, and the RA was yelling "what the H$$L is that smell". I had burned my spoiled chili, and it filled the entire hall with it's wonderful aroma. Of course, I had "no idea" what the smell was and hurried back to my room to deal with the evidence. I ended up waiting until the coast was clear and I threw out the pot down the garbage chute. After that, I had mainly spaghettios, mac N' cheese, and frozen pizza for me weekend meals.

With all the potato talk may I suggest Alton Brown Good Eats Mashers? Season 1,Episode 2, "This Spuds for You." He uses two different potatoes and discusses the differences in the kinds of potatoes and how their starches work differently.

This just happened. I'm microwaving some frozen chicken strips. The bag says to place chicken on a plate, cover, heat. I covered it with a paper towel. I smelled burning and I saw a small flame shoot out the top of the paper towel.

This just happened. I'm microwaving some frozen chicken strips. The bag says to place chicken on a plate, cover, heat. I covered it with a paper towel. I smelled burning and I saw a small flame shoot out the top of the paper towel.

Were the paper towels made of recycled materials, by any chance? Shortly after I moved into my office, I used one of the paper towels supplied by my landlady to cover something I was putting in the microwave, and she happened to be in the kitchen in time to tell me not to do that, because she had had a towel spark on her before and had realized that there was some metal in the recycled paper towels, from staples and paper clips and whatnot.

This wasn't a kitchen disaster, per say, but it did happen in the kitchen.

My friend and I were playing with Pinterest and decided to make glow-in-the-dark balloons. She blew up a balloon, broke a glow stick and proceeded to dump the contents into the balloon. Turns out that there's broken glass inside those glow sticks. The balloon exploded and sprayed glow stuff all over the kitchen. We turned out the lights and it looked like a crime scene: the ceiling, walls and floors were covered with little glowing dots in a 10 foot circle.